US President Barack Obama’s administration on Friday released a legislative proposal intended to provide foreign governments with a streamlined process for asking US tech companies to share e-mail data and conduct wiretaps for criminal investigations.
The framework comes one day after a US federal appeals court said the government could not compel Microsoft to turn over customer e-mails stored on servers outside the US.
The proposal would require the US Congress to change decades-old electronic communications law. It would also require the consent of any foreign government because it is designed to be reciprocal.
Britain is the first country the US is seeking to enter into such a bilateral agreement with.
A technology industry group said it was encouraged by the talks between the US and Britain.
“A strengthened legal framework must value privacy and human rights while ensuring law enforcement can do its important work,” tech industry advocacy group Reform Government Surveillance said in a statement.
Current agreements used to allow law enforcement access to data stored overseas are known as mutual legal assistance treaties.
However, such treaties — which involve making a formal diplomatic request for data and having authorities in the host country obtain a warrant on behalf of the requesting nation — are considered overly cumbersome by law enforcement officials who say the process often takes several months.
“The current situation is unsustainable,” US Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik wrote to US Vice President Joe Biden in a letter proposing the new framework. “If foreign governments cannot access data they need for legitimate law enforcement, including terrorism investigations, they may also enact laws requiring companies to store data in their territory.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema